Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 136

Issues and Returns - out now

I've been waiting years for the excuse to use this picture on my blog!

And now I have my chance, because my story Issues and Returns (see what I did there?) is available from Mischief press, in their e-anthology Exposure: those who love to watch and be watched. It's all about a library assistant in a university library (I wonder where I got that idea, ahem) who gets up to naughtiness among the stacks. Despite my pic, Kelly isn't actually a nymphomanic ... just bored out of her mind by her miserable bloody job.

(No actual resemblance to any of my past employment history intended. Honestly. You believe, me, don't you?)

"The highlight of my day was morning coffee, because if it was a staff member's birthday she'd bring in packs of biscuits to share round. Seriously, that was the most exciting part of the working day."

I'm not going to post a proper excerpt on this blog because there's a great big one already over on the Mischief page for your reading pleasure. Enjoy - but remember to keep the noise down!

Buy at Mischief : Amazon US : Amazon UK

(NB: You do not need a Kindle to read Amazon e-books. Download the app to read on PC or phone)

Eroticon

Well, yeah, it's possibly a bit late to register now, as it's on tomorrow. So that's where I'm spending my weekend (Yes, driving up and down the M5 to Bristol). I'm excited!

Eroticon is a new workshop/networking/talking-ourselves-into-a-panic event for erotica writers and sex-bloggers ... which is an interesting combination really. In my (limited) experience the overlap between people who write fiction about red-hot sex, and people whose real lives are racy enough to sustain a regular blog about it, is ... not broad. We writers may have our moments. But if we had too many of them we'd be too tired (and too self-satisfied) to actually write, I suspect!

So, it's going to be interesting. There's going to be a TV crew there, I believe. And there will be wine and food and quite possibly a little bit of discussion about Paypal.

See you there, if you're coming!

Excerpt - The Auction

I'm actually quite shy and inept in social situations, and easy to embarrass. Maybe that's why I like writing about shame - the hot and helpless thrill of public exposure and humiliation. Fiction takes my worst fears and transmutes them into something not just bearable but actually filled with delight and power - which is one of the extraordinary magics of writing. Here's the science bit: we often write about stuff that we don't want to experience in real life. How hard is that to grasp? Apparently, for some people, pretty difficult:  if you've been unaware of the Paypal Censorship shitstorm going on ... well, here's a catch-up. It's stressing the hell out of erotica authors right now.

And as promised some time back, here's an excerpt from my short story The Auction , which appears in Mischief anthology Shameful Thrills: girls who should know better. It's a very, very dirty story even by my standards - and a really rough ride for the heroine. Enjoy it with her...

'First time on the block,' said the auctioneer, grinning. His skin gleamed with sweat. 'Can you see that blush? She's practically a virgin.'

She squirmed with shame as the catcalls and whistles rose to a new crescendo. She was wearing only tiny cut-off jeans and a deep-necked tee-shirt hacked off so short that it barely covered her breasts. There were big manga-style boots on her feet but they didn't make her feel any less vulnerable, only clumsy and uncertain of her footing, like a newborn calf. Above the boots, hold-up stockings covered her to mid-thigh. They had been white to start with but they were stained with dust, and the lace was torn.

'What do we call you, Red?' he asked.

'Antonia.' The word seemed to burn on her lips. 

'Sweet. You scared, Antonia?'

'Please. . .'

'You should be.'

Her legs nearly gave way under her and only his grip on her elbow kept her on her feet. The shift of her hips made the tight shorts press into her ass crack and she gasped with discomfort, but the sound was masked by the gales of laughter from their audience.  

'D'you know what's going to happen to you?'

She shook her head.

'Of course you do. I'm going to sell you to the highest bidder, bitch.' The insult was savored, and Antonia felt the heat run through her body like a shockwave. 'Whoever wants your cunt the most tonight is going to get it. Of course, you'll be lucky if he only wants your cunt—and not every other orifice. See anyone out there you like the look of, Antonia?'

She twisted her face away, shutting her eyes, but he transferred his grip to the nape of her neck and squeezed warningly.

'Look at them. You're here because you're worth money to them. Look them in the eye—it's the last chance you'll get.'

She looked. There were—what?— maybe a couple of hundred people out there, men and women, standing near the front or sitting on the hoods of cars and lolling across parked motorbikes further back. Black clothing and leather predominated, where they had bothered to cover up against the night air. It looked like a scene from a Mad Max movie. There were a lot of grins, but not one of them reassuring.

'One of those lucky people is going to be fucking you real soon. One of them's going to own you, bitch. You know what that means? They can have anything they want from you.'

Antonia couldn't help whimpering. She was shaking with tension and she knew he could feel it.

'Shall we have a look at the goods then?' he called out, and they answered with enthusiasm.  'Right.' He parked the beer bottle between his belt buckle and his stomach—where it stuck up like a crude glass erection—and tugged a small piece of plastic from his pocket. It was a cable tie. Scooping up the smooth fall of coppery hair that Antonia was so proud of, he twisted it into a rope and secured it with the tie. His movements were swift and practiced. 'I like to see a good handgrip on a slave,' he informed her, wrapping the bright ponytail around his left fist and pulling her head up and back. Tears brimmed in Antonia's eyes.

'Now, I see we've got a good big pair of tits on this one,' he remarked to the crowd. Retrieving his bottle, he took one last sip and then upended it over her breasts, dowsing both thoroughly. Shame burned through her body all the way to her core. The liquid was chilled and the smell of cheap beer made her head swim. She was aware of the sudden pull of her nipples as they tightened in response to the unexpected cold shower, poking out against the taut and now clinging cloth.

The auctioneer tossed the empty bottle back over his shoulder. She heard it smash.

'Yeah, that's nice,' he purred, flicking her nipples with his nail to accentuate their jut and pinning her as she flinched. 'Imagine getting your cock between these, gentlemen. Look at the size of them! And real too! But don't take my word for it; see for yourselves.'


Buy Shameful Thrills at Mischief : Amazon US : Amazon UK
(You don't need a Kindle to read Amazon e-books - download the app to PC or phone)

Eyecandy Monday - and OOOOH! Look at this!!

I found this pic on Wikipedia, of all places. Education is a wonderful thing :-)

Another website of some interest to me: take a look at Mischief Press!  It's just gone live!

That means that you can buy Red Grow the Roses direct from the publisher, if you have some sort of aversion to doing it on Amazon (same price too!).  On the Mischief blog, this is what they said about me:

"This month we're opening our account with one of the most original and thrilling vampire erotica novels in recent times – Red Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless. Author of the now legendary Cruel Enchantment , Janine Ashbless injects freshness and originality and the most eye-watering erotica scenes into the ever popular vampire genre."

"Now legendary" : "eye-watering erotica"- now that made my cup of tea go up my nose the wrong way ;-)

Mischief launches officially to the press in March, so I'll say more about that later. But in the meantime, please do go ahead and look at their early lists, the blog and the preview snippets, and you can buy anthologies including my short stories too - here (Woohoo! - the page features a great big excerpt from my story Issues and Returns ) and here.

"Allow us to seduce you with Mischief, a new series of erotica and erotic romance ebook fiction. And our mischievous mission is to arouse your imaginations by featuring the broadest range of sexual and romantic fantasy fiction possible within one imprint. Four original ebooks will be published each month featuring contemporary stories written by leading authors across three formats, so you can dip in and out of our short story collections, turn the lights down low for a petite novel, or sit up all night with a novel.

Our storylines are about men and women, and men with men, and women with women, and women with lots of men. Mischief stories are forbidden pleasures and private thoughts and Mischief's fiction is where hot explicit fantasies hit the ground running to discover a second life in your imagination. We're available to all those women and men with a sense of adventure and an open mind. It's our aim to be your literary harlot and your scarlet mistress.

BDSM, dirty vanilla, female domination, exotic locations, paranormal worlds, tireless lovers, wanton women, passion, the thrill of shame, kinky fetishes, illicit encounters, everyday and extraordinary adventures; we will deliver a broad spectrum of erotic fantasies and explicit romance every single month.

So read Mischief in bed, read Mischief on trains, read Mischief on planes, read Mischief on the beach ... wherever and whenever the mood takes you, and the tingle becomes an urge, it's time to get mischievous."

I'm still proof-reading "Named and Shamed"...

... and yes, putting more naughtiness in. I'm surprised it doesn't burst at the seams!

Shorts coming down

I've barely recovered from a tipsy night at the Naked Muse preview and I'm off to take part in the More Bang Charity Reading Slam tonight, so I have to go practice my reading, but there's just time to catch up with story sale news.

I've sold three shorties (all around 1500 words) to Harlequin Spice: they're going to appear in a book edited by Alison Tyler but I don't have a title or a cover or a line-up or a publication date (given it's Harlequin ... probably not any time real soon). I believe there are going to be 69 short-short stories in the anthology. Mine are called Attic Moment ;  Love, Honour and Obey ; and Hare Coursing .



I have an outrageous BDSM story called Teppanyaki in Anything For You: kinky couples erotica (ed. Rachel Kramer Bussel) and due out in August. Teppanyaki,  if you haven't tried it, is a Japanese style of hotplate cooking and my story is about a dinner party that would NOT feature on "Come Dine with Me."  Heh.
And ALREADY OUT - but we've only just got permission to talk about the books -  are two stories in Mischief e-anthologies:


Issues and Returns , a exhibitionist story about a frustrated librarian (I've been there!) in Exposure: those who love to watch and be watched.



And The Auction , a hardcore fem-sub story in Shameful Thrills: girls who should know better.

More about brand new publisher Mischief and these stories next week, I promise :-)
Now going to shut myself in the bedroom and time myself, *snigger*.

Arthur of the Britons

Before there was Camelot, or Merlin ... before girly pagan Michael Praed in his tight leggings in Robin of Sherwood ... there was Arthur of the Britons . It was gritty, it was slightly pervy, it was violent and political - it was the Game of Thrones of its day.


Well, except filmed in a wet field in Somerset on a shoestring budget.

You probably have to be really old, like me, to remember it (it was first aired in 1972), and even most Brits don't recall it. But oh boy, what fond memories I had! One of my first TV crushes was on ... one of the leading men :-)  So when the two series came out on DVD, me and my similarly ancient friend Lucilla sat down for many happy hours of nostalgic viewing.

Arthur of the Britons was like no other interpretation of the famous legend: doing away with the knights in shining armour and the Round Table, and the Holy Grail and all that malarky, it made a grab for historical plausibility instead. Arthur (played by Oliver Tobias) is a Celtic warlord in the aftermath of  the Roman Empire's retreat from Britain. The many Celtic tribes are at each other's throats, Christianity and Mithraism jostle for influence, and bands of Saxons are staking claim to the land. Arthur is a great warrior but also a shrewd (in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, sly and manipulative) politician whose overriding aim is to unite the Celts to withstand the Saxon invasion. He is also enormously fucking hot.


He has a hot blond best buddy called Kai (played by Michael Gothard), who was a Saxon foundling and so suffers from quite a lot of racial prejudice. Kai is a total horndog, and he pursues anything in a skirt. Sometimes he and Arthur are after the same woman, which gives me ... ideas I was not capable of entertaining in the 1970s.

 
There are numerous cameo roles and repeat characters, including Brian Blessed as Mark of Cornwall, who of course rolls his eyes and shouts a lot in the way that Brian Blessed does.


Now, this was filmed in the Seventies, so you have to cut it some slack. You need to be able to tolerate some VERY BAD HAIR indeed, for a start.


And TV scripting has changed over the decades. It's fascinating to see how much. There's very little witty banter or plot exposition. You, the viewer, are expected to read between the lines and work things out for yourself. Plots move at a stately pace. Whole MINUTES can go by without anyone saying anything - in fact one episode consists of one extended fight scene between Arthur and Kai (despite their intense bromance, they are very competitive), which is - surprisingly - really gripping.


And it shows its age in some odd ways. The blokes have a habit of guffawing at each other. And Arthur, despite, his intelligence and relative sophistication, seems very confused about women. If he ever meets a woman he fancies, his immediate reaction is to pick a fight with her, as if he were a six-year-old running up to girls in the playground and pulling their pigtails before shouting "Ewww! Girls! They stink!". It makes me glad that we did escape the Seventies, since men then were clearly off their trollies.

But the DVD is fine fine entertainment in many other ways

The fight choreography is really pretty good. This was in the days before martial arts got included in screen combat so it's largely men walloping each other with hard objects and they look like they mean it. It looks rough, and incredibly hard work, and I bet the bruises were real.The guys keep getting their shirts off :-)  They get whipped. They get tied up. In one memorable episode Kai is yoked to a  plough and made to till a field by a Saxon woman.  There's just this whole undercurrent of sex ... or maybe that's me.The plots are simple, but forceful. And interesting. Like ... do you fall out with one of your hard-won political allies if you find out he's trading slaves and you really don't approve?Arthur's main love-interest over the two series is Rowena, princess of the Jutes (played by German actress Gila von Weitershausen), who is a spunky, charming, indefatigable proto-feminist in spite of everything the guys do, and will one day be queen of her people. The evolving Celtic/Saxon relationship is handled well. Neither side is good, neither bad.On a limited budget, they did really well with the scenery: the muddy villages, the feasting halls, the pens of rare-breed livestock. This was cutting-edge historical verisimilitude at the time. I still fancy Kai just as I did all those years ago. Which sort of surprised me. But now I fancy Arthur too. Bonus!It's just fun! 
I think the thing I really like is the way it seems completely self-contained, in its tiny muddy corner of Ancient Britain; completely convinced of its own reality. It made me happy. If only they'd gone to third series, and not left the story hanging in the air like that ...

The Naked Muse 2012 - this week!

Naked Muse Calendar 2012 Preview from Adam Clarke on Vimeo.

The Naked Muse 2012

41 Photographers and Poets Unite in Unique Charity Project
What do poetry, beautiful male poets, creative women and Type One Diabetes have in common?      Answer: The Naked Muse 2012.
"...beautiful photography, astounding quality, lovely men..." (Filament Magazine)
Faced with a two year old son diagnosed with Type One Diabetes, mother, poet and Wild Women Press founder, Victoria Bennett decided to take creative action.


She has created a unique project in which 27 UK based women poets and photographers worked with 14 UK male poets who agreed to pose in a nude calendar and exhibition, exploring the male muse and female creator.
The poems feature alongside each of the 14 images in the final limited edition Naked Muse 2012 Calendar, which was recently rated in the Top 10 Calendars of 2012 by The Independent.
The Naked Muse "Unveiled" exhibition opens February in London, and features 30 limited edition nude studies of the 14 male poets featured in the Naked Muse 2012 charity calendar. All artists and designers involved have worked for free to help Victoria raise as much money as possible for JDRF.

John Siddique says, on being a Muse in the project, "It was a bit like diving in for a swim, life affords us opportunities to make things of it; this was one of those things. Either you live or don't live, it is a choice in each moment. I found it a very rich and nourishing experience as Leonie Hampton is a real artist...For me to be looked at this way gave me so much back...To be seen, to be acknowledged is a basic human need..."
Commenting on the project, Victoria Bennett said "What we have created is a beautiful work of art that explores and celebrates the male muse. It has been made possible through the generosity and creativity of all involved, who have kindly supported our vision and our cause.  I hope the project will attract the attention of anybody interested in photography and poetry, as well as people who simply want to support the vital work of JRDF".
The Naked Muse "Unveiled" exhibition will feature at The Space, Hackney, London and is open to the public 24th and 25th February 2012, 11am -8pm.The Big Project Space, SPACE, The Triangle, 129 -131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH
If you want to go to the Private Viewing - with auction, raffle and CAKE - on Thursday 23rd Feb, there are limited free tickets available on application
  The calendar is also available direct from www.wildwomenpress.com at £12.99 including shipping. All profits from the exhibition & calendar will go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Alternative Literature

[click to enlarge] From XKCD
For those of you who still like traditional books on paper, with actual words ... Lovehoney UK has a nice little special offer going until the 29th February:

If you buy any one of the Black Lace books they have in stock, you get a free bullet vibe worth £4.99.  They don't have any of my novels but they do have four anthos with my stories in (follow post labels below for more details, and excerpts from each story).


  I buy from Lovehoney myself quite often - incredibly prompt FREE delivery of all sorts of stuff (*ahem*) under a plain wrapper ;-)  Way better service than Amazon, and in fact better than any other internet company I can think of.  Lovehoney rocks!

Public reading at Sh!

I'm taking part in a public erotica reading on the 24th February in London  - that's NEXT FRIDAY - so please do come along and watch us getting all hot under the collar for charity.

More Bang Reading Slam

Organised by K D Grace, (with her co-sponsors, the Fannies Rule Group headed up by Sarah Berry), the More Bang Reading Slam presents a plethora of sizzling 5-minute erotica, prose and poetry.

This evening of hot reading is very special because all proceeds will go to the Sexual Advice Association. There'll be a charge of £5 for guests and participants, all for a good cause!

There'll also be raffles and giveaways. There'll be fizz and cupcakes. But mostly there'll be lots of fun and lots of sexy readings from lots of sexy readers strutting their stuff and making the audience squirm deliciously in their seats.

Wanna read? Come prepared with five minutes worth of filth and fun. Warning, any attempt to read longer will result in a good spanking.

Wanna just listen and sip fizz? Come prepared for a good time. Warning, those not prepared for a good time may also be spanked at the digression of the management.

Fun for a good cause is the yummiest kind of fun. Come celebrate with us! 

Lineup (so far):

Kay Jaybee
Lucy Felthouse
Lexie Bay
Ernesto Sarezale of Velvet Tongue fame
Sarah Berry of Fannying Around fame
Liz Coldwell
Scarlett French
Annie Player
The Dragon King's Daughter
Katie Walsch
Lynn Mann
Meg Phillips
K D Grace
Janine Ashbless




Time:
18:30 (for 19:00 start) - 21:00, Friday 24th Feb.

Location: 
Sh! women's erotic emporium (Portobello branch)
253 Portobello Road,  
London
W11 1LR 

Nearest tube: Ladbrook Grove. Shop entrance is actually on Lancaster Rd, just round the corner from Portobello Rd. Men are welcome with a woman.

Offical details here, including an e-mail link  - due to space restrictions in their basement you need to book in advance.